


Parlour Tricks

by evilhippo



Category: Firefly, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Crossover, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-16
Updated: 2011-01-16
Packaged: 2017-10-14 19:57:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,536
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/152892
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evilhippo/pseuds/evilhippo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In every universe their meeting is different but inevitable.  This time, it takes a psychic and semantic games to bring Sherlock and John together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Parlour Tricks

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for the [Sherlockmas](http://sherlockmas.livejournal.com) exchange on Livejournal, for [darkmagic_luvr](http://darkmagic_luvr). Her prompt was "a Firefly crossover in which River annoys Sherlock."

There is a line between empiricism and fancy, and it is best guarded by evidence gleaned from repeatable experiments. Most people will claim to have a 'sense' about others, but this is an internalized construct based on preconceptions that have already been subsumed into the underlying framework that makes up social conventions. Though the evidence may appear to be duplicable and the subconscious may process more than the observer is consciously aware of, the results cannot be duplicated except within the original subject. The effect of the impression depends on the perceiver's experience rather than any external values. It is far from useful as evidence, though the fact that it produces sound conclusions in an appreciable percentage of instances leads many people to believe that it is a valid assessment of 'fact.' Whence the word 'sensible' and the demonstrably un-sensible reliance upon its importance.

Therefore, when the doctor interrupted my analysis of the blood contaminant to declare "I have a bad feeling about this," I believe my feelings of annoyance were entirely justified.

The scan indicated elevated levels of serotonin and extremely high levels of adrenaline, but no further abnormalities.

"If any drug was involved, it has long since been metabolised," I explained. "The injuries are self-inflicted—all of the tissue under his fingernails is his own. So, a psychological breaking point of some kind was reached. When did he arrive here?"

"I don't know him. I'm just passing through, myself," the doctor replied. He was unremarkable in appearance: approximately an inch shy of average height, sandy blonde hair, no apparent tattoos or scars. Most notable was his military bearing; no doubt he'd been involved in the Unification War. Few enlisted men had not. His hand was unsteady as he packed his tools away, and he'd rested his cane against the cot near his feet. Invalided home, then. If this had been his home, I would certainly have judged him as one of the Independents, but his accent and comfort in addressing me marked him unmistakably as a former Alliance medic.

"I've seen worse than this," he continued, bringing up the irrelevant in an attempt to make conversation.

There were callouses on the victim's hands: the man had been a worker. No softening of the callouses. Remains of grease under his fingernails, fresh, probably animal fat. Various partially-healed cuts on the hands. He hadn't given up work for the drug, then.

"The callouses on his hands indicate that he was previously a hard labourer, most likely a farmer, though he recently made a switch to a ship's butcher. Not a very good one at that, either. The cuts on his hands are from a cleaver, poorly handled. There is lard under the nails."

"How could you know that?"

"You'll find his assignment in his pocket."

After a brief hesitation to emphasize his doubt and his moral qualms about rifling through a dead man's pockets he produced the sheet.

"You're right," he said. "That's amazing," he added after a moment's more consideration.

"It's obvious. The question is how he was exposed to whatever it was that caused this."

There were few motives for willingly ingesting a substance of this nature, among them:  
Euphoria  
Contentment  
Escape  
Insight

There was also the matter of whether it was for thrill, necessity, or duress. Additionally, the negative shift in psychological state may not have been the intended effect.

Without further evidence it would be difficult to determine whether he would have ingested it willingly.

"What is your job here, exactly?" the doctor interrupted again. "There isn't much honest work in these parts. I'm having trouble finding some myself, in fact. This man didn't die doing something he was supposed to be doing, and if you're tied up in it..."

His agitation was causing him to fall back into the outer-planet vernacular. I waved him off. His concerns were none of mine.

There were no outward signs of struggle. If the drug had been administered by someone else, it would have been by someone trusted, or the dose would have to have been delivered in a less observable manner.

Benefits for third party:  
Adverse effects to reputation  
Control  
Experimentation

"I'd like to do an autopsy," I concluded.

"This is no place for an autopsy," he said, directing his gaze around the kitchen for emphasis, as if I'd forgotten where we were standing. It would only need to be disinfected thoroughly afterward, a matter the proprietor could handle.

To illustrate his point he had zipped up the body bag and was carrying it back to the refrigeration unit in the back of the inn before I could mount a counter-argument. As he made his exit with the victim I marked down the last of my notes. There was little use in an autopsy anyway. There was nothing unusual in the blood, which left only circumstantial factors, and finding and interviewing his acquaintances would serve just as well in that regard. While this planet was dull, with little more than an inn to its name, it was unlikely to drive a man to murder and self-harm. What remained was psychological impetus, and that could not be divined from a corpse.

Mycroft had insisted that I avoid this case, and it seemed he had been right for once. It had been hardly worth the time in coming. I returned to the lobby to wait for his shuttle. Few things irked me more than my reliance on him for transport.

A lithe girl stood waiting near the sofa. She held herself with martial artist's discipline, though her stance seemed to imply a dancer's background. Her eyes, however, didn't focus on any one object in the room. She had the look of a woman possessed.

"Sherlock Holmes!" she greeted.

"Do I know you?"

"No. Yes. Not in person, though... I'm River."

As she spoke her focus drifted from me to spots variably in front of and behind me, the kind of behaviour a less-reasoned person would interpret as her looking right through them. To me, she seemed to be focusing on projections of her own thoughts, visualizing what she was thinking.

"Nice to have met you, then," I replied, covering as many of her uncertain tenses in my response as possible.

She sat down on the edge of the sofa opposite me and stared openly, studying me.

"You're not like everyone else," she said. "You grew up in the Core but you see the things they don't."

"I'm not interested in a reading," I said.

She tilted her head to the side. "I can't help it. Can you look at letters on a page and keep them from turning into words in your mind?"

"You're observing, not reading. You're using visual cues from my manner and dress to make deductions. Vague ones at that." It was the mark of all the backwater psychics in the 'verse. She was young and she was sharp, I would give her that much, but the only point to her observations was to make me uncomfortable or curious, and of the two she had succeeded only partly on the former and on the latter not at all. Despite this, I still wasn't able to pinpoint her motivations in singling me out for this charade.

"You could do better?"

"You were educated in the Core, that's clear from your abilities. You carry yourself like a dancer, but are always ready to spring. That says martial arts training, probably wushu. You think your lack of focus will imply to others that you're looking into them instead, and you're hoping that by bringing me into your game you'll gain some reputation for your abilities."

She laughed, but her eyes remained fixed on me, serious. "The last one is wrong. It's not my game," her tone brightened abruptly as she continued, "They see it. More than Mr. Universe. More than your brother. They see it and they, he... he's waiting for us both."

I was carrying one of Mycroft's ID's, which I'd lifted from his ship to make obtaining files a little easier. He hadn't missed it, which meant he'd intended for me to have it anyway. It was a simple conclusion for her to make.

"You're using deduction as a parlour trick," I said, though I was aware that something still wasn't adding up.

"We are _in_ a parlour." This seemed to be a point of particular agitation.

"You're being deliberately obtuse." I retrieved my notes from my pocket, in the hope that she would be deterred. Mycroft appeared to be running late. While normally I would have appreciated the time to tend to my own thoughts, it was decidedly less than quiet and this girl was pretending I wasn't the only one privy to them. I couldn't help adding, "and this is a lobby. It lacks the privacy implied by the word parlour."

"But we're still talking." She gathered her knees up to her chest, perching herself tediously on the edge of the table. "Your brother's going to be late anyhow. We attacked him." She smiled.

"I'm sure he had it coming," I replied. She was baiting me, waiting for me to give ground.

"The crew don't much like Alliance, and he was smug."

"Sounds like my brother," as well as most everyone else associated with the Alliance. Vague, vague, vague.

"But you should be waiting for the doctor anyway."

"I don't need a doctor."

"No? He's a much better writer than you are."

"Why would that matter to me?" She had successfully piqued my curiosity as to how far she would push the act. What was fascinating was that she showed no outward signs of lying: no unnecessary pauses or shifts in breathing. Only her unsteady yet focused gaze, and that was meant to signify something else entirely. She had been well-trained.

"A better writer means a bigger audience. You'll need that. He wouldn't be unwilling."

"You can't possibly know that."

"If you looked you'd see it too."

"No one can see the future."

"Forward is always a reflection backward, yes. It's like a two-way mirror. You can only see if you're looking from the other side of the line. But that doesn't mean you don't see."

It took me a few moments to parse this as anything other than nonsense. Up to this point I had been incredulous toward our semantic game, and though her assessment of future sight was one of reasonable denial it was so wrapped up in vagaries that I found myself immediately recalling my earlier assessment in regard to the doctor's intuition. This fell squarely on the side of fancy.

"What line is that?" I asked.

"Not the one between empiricism and fancy," she replied in a mockery of my accent. "You're used to being the one who's always right. What I say makes sense to me; what you say, to you. But to others each of makes the obvious sound unreachable. Wouldn't you say?"

"I wouldn't."

"No matter. The game is on, whether you join in or not."

I was more than a little unsettled at having my thoughts vocalized by someone else, but she seemed to have reached the end of her prognostications. Up to this point I'd found it impossible to get a read on her intentions, but the facts were beginning to coalesce.

"The airy demeanour: it isn't an affectation. You're shielding your psyche from something. What is it?"

At that moment doctor returned from the back room, this time accompanied by a taller, civilian man. The girl's expression toward him showed that he was family and the girl strode from the table without another word to me.

"We have to leave," she said with an urgency that had been absent just moments ago.

"Already? We just got here, and you know the captain has business he means to attend to."

"Two by two, hands of blue..."

"River, please." His tone implied suppressed frustration. This had been a long-standing problem, then, certainly not an affectation.

"They'll come, they are coming. He knows... and he knows he is going to know. Two by two... "

Her brother took her by the arm and led her outside, directing an unnecessarily apologetic smile toward me. As they passed she leaned in close and whispered one word in my ear: "Moriarty."

Moriarty. It was a name I'd only heard in settlement legends, on the planets near the edge of the darkest parts of space, where they claimed, irrationally, that men who stared into it went mad. I'd heard it invoked in connection to far less subtle deaths, but thus far he, or it—whatever it was or was meant to stand for—had eluded me. There had been no hard evidence.

It took me a moment to come to terms with considering her frightened whisper as hard evidence. It was a feeling and nothing more, but for some reason (or, to be more precise, a lack thereof) I believed it.

"Wait!" I called out after her, but she and her brother had already gone.

The military doctor was at the desk, checking out, when I interrupted.

"Do you know them?" I asked.

"Just in passing," the doctor replied.

"They've fallen in with thieves," Mrs. Hudson added with her usual flair for conspiracy and intrigue. "But they're the nice sort," she added earnestly.

"I need to ask a favour, Mrs. Hudson."

"Yes, your brother said he was going to be late. You know you can stay here any time you like," she replied, casting a quick, meaningful glance toward the doctor. He turned and stepped away in an attempt at modesty, or simply to remove himself from the conversation. I shook my head.

"I need to borrow the ship."

"The baker's ship? Don't be so impatient," she tutted, making her typical attempts to be a stand-in for my own mother. "He's not going to be _that_ late, Sherlock."

"I'll need to borrow it indefinitely."

She hesitated, worrying her lip, but she and I both knew she owed me more a favour greater than a room for the night.

"You know I can't let that go for free."

"You have my account, you can deduct a monthly rent."

"Do you have the credits for that?" she asked, lowering her voice.

"You have his account, too," I replied, matching her whisper before turning to the man who had been predicted to become my colleague.

"You're not thinking of following them, are you?" he asked. He was looking at the door and seemed to be considering it himself. What he and River's brother had discussed was a matter at which I could only guess.

"Mrs. Hudson has a spare ship she'll loan us. Coming?"

"What? Why would I..."

"You're not employed, you have no close family to speak of. You said yourself that you were curious about what happened to that man. It's better than staying here, and _they_ seem to have the key."

There was little that was more exciting than a new lead, but I was halfway to the door before the word "Wait!" reached my ears. John stood behind me, his bag slung over his shoulder. "Wait for me."

"Finally," I declared, "the criminal class has something interesting in store."


End file.
